For the Greeks and Romans, Homer’s Epic, “The Odyssey” and Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” are much more than just entertaining tales about God’s, mortals, monsters and etc. The tales also served as a cultural paradigm from which every role and relationship can be defined. Through the “Odyssey” the reader, old or young, can learn important themes about what was considered normal in those Mediterranean cultures. Women play vital roles in these two narratives, mortal women and god’s alike. In both Epic’s, women and the effects that they had on the lives of the others around them, especially men were great, but their roles are so small that it’s hard to catch just how important women like Penelope, Hera (Juno) and Athena truly are. I plan to compare and contrast these two works of literature and the women that reside within their pages. Throughout “The Odyssey” there is a limited presentation of women. Whether servant girls, deities, queens, or God’s, they are mostly all assigned to the narrow role of mothers, seductresses, or some combination of both. Mothers are seen as the givers of pity and sorrow rather than true “supporters” of their sons and husbands in terms of military or personal quests. In most instances depicting mother figures in “The Odyssey” the women are in need of support and guidance as they are all but weak, fragile, and unable without the steady hand of their male counterpart to guide them. Women appear to be lost and inconsolable if unable to nurture their husbands and sons, as in the case of poor Penelope. Penelope mourns her lost husband, seemingly without noticing the attentions of the suitors. At one point, one of the bards of the palace begins singing about the deadly battles where she assumes her husband fell during battle, and she then falls to the ground weeping and mourning the absence of her husband, Odysseus. It takes the leadership and masculine presence of her son, Telemachus to calm her down again. However, Telemachus offers his mother a rather insulting jab instead, stating that “Ulysses is not the only man who never came back from Troy, but many another went down as well as he. Go, then, within the house and busy yourself with your daily duties, your loom, your distaff, and the ordering of your servants; for speech is man’s matter, and mine above all others- for it is I who am master here” (Book 1). At this moment, Telemachus asserts his role in the masculine order while also scolding his mother for her “conscious effort” to lead the suitors on. This dependence of mothers on their son’s devotion to them is made clear elsewhere in Homer, as in the case of Anticlea, Ulysses’ mother, whom couldn’t even so much as exist without her son, and died after waiting many years for him to come home, she made the statement that “she died not of illness but of longing for her son Odysseus”. The mothers and most women in this text serve little function aside from mourning their men and urging them to remain safe, which is a very important them